The king of sabotage

On Sunday 16 August 2020, Ronnie O'Sullivan beat Kyren Wilson 18 to 8 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and won the World Snooker Championship for the sixth time. He was 44 years old. It was the strangest fortnight the tournament had ever staged. The first day had been played to an empty arena because of the pandemic, before a small, distanced audience was allowed back in for the final sessions. The sixth title drew O'Sullivan level with Steve Davis and Ray Reardon, one short of Stephen Hendry's seven. Sitting in the working circle around him, as he had been since 2011, was a consultant psychiatrist from Sheffield called Professor Steve Peters.

Peters is not a sports psychologist by training. He is a clinician. For two decades he worked in the NHS as a consultant psychiatrist, including a long period at the Special Hospital at Rampton with patients with personality disorders. In parallel, he held a senior clinical lectureship and later a professorship in psychiatry at Sheffield University. A former student of his recommended him to British Cycling in 2001. He moved full time to the cycling team in 2005, through the run that produced Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and the era Sir Dave Brailsford described, in print, as the best appointment he had ever made. Liverpool Football Club brought him in November 2012. The England football squad followed in March 2014. He published The Chimp Paradox in January 2012. It has stayed in print ever since.

Anyone who has followed snooker since the late nineties knows the version of O'Sullivan that existed before the work with Peters began. He has spoken openly, for years, about long periods of depression, about substance use, about a father who went to prison when he was sixteen and stayed there for most of his adult playing life. In December 2006, in a UK Championship quarter final against Stephen Hendry in York, he missed a red in the sixth frame, conceded the match while trailing 4 to 1, and walked out. He was fined twenty thousand pounds. Some years later, on the BBC, he compared that moment to Luis Suarez biting Branislav Ivanovic. He called it a moment of madness. He said you regret it afterwards, but at the time you are over run by the emotions.

Not through talent

The phrase O'Sullivan keeps coming back to, in his own descriptions of those years, is self sabotage. He has made more competitive maximum 147 breaks than anyone else in the history of the sport. He won his first ranking title at seventeen and is regularly named by other professionals as the most naturally gifted player ever to pick up a cue. By his own account, he also spent a long stretch of his career finding ways to throw frames he should not have lost. Peters was never there for the cue action. The cue action had been the best in the world for a quarter of a century. The work was about the chair.

The chair between shots

The Chimp Paradox, in one paragraph, is a model that asks a performer to separate two parts of their own mind. The older, faster, emotional part Peters calls the Chimp. He calls the slower, deliberate, value-driven part the Human. The work is not to silence the Chimp. It is to notice when the Chimp has picked up the cue, and to put it back in its seat. Done once, at a desk, it sounds slight. Done every twenty seconds for seventeen days, in front of a television audience, against an opponent who is also good, it is something else.

What Peters was teaching, frame by frame, was a way of using the chair. Snooker is played in that chair. The shot itself takes a few seconds. The wait between shots, while the other player is at the table, can run to half an hour in a single frame. A player who cannot govern his own attention in that chair will lose to a player who can, regardless of how the balls are running.

Two credits, seven years apart

In May 2013, after beating Barry Hawkins 18 to 12 to defend the title with a record six centuries in a Crucible final, O'Sullivan named Peters in his post match interviews. He said he would not have managed back to back titles without him. He said seventeen days at the Crucible was a long time, and that everyone knew what he was like, up and down. It was an unusual thing for a snooker player to say. In the sport, the people working in the background tend to stay there.

The 2020 echo is quieter, and in some ways more interesting. By then the credit had stopped sounding like gratitude and started sounding like method. Speaking to BBC Two after winning his sixth, O'Sullivan was matter of fact. He said he was not an endurance type player because he did not compete enough, that he had only half a chance, that he had not expected to win. It is a strange thing to hear from someone who has lifted the trophy. It is also, on reflection, the voice of a player who has been taught to stop telling himself stories about the result.

Why this matters for the rest of us

Almost nobody reading this will ever sit in a chair at the Crucible. Almost nobody will ever work with a six time world champion. The reason the story is worth telling anyway is that the craft scales down without losing its shape. Helping one person stop sabotaging themselves, week after week, for as long as it takes, is the same work whether the room is a Sheffield hotel suite or a quiet studio above a music shop.

The performance psychologists and one to one coaches doing this work in private practice mostly do not work with Olympians. They work with a club golfer whose hands stop trusting the first tee. With a county tennis player whose serve goes when the score is tight. A teenage swimmer who is faster in training than at meets. With a musician who plays the piece beautifully alone in the room and stiffens the moment a second person walks in. The session looks, from the outside, like a long conversation. The work is the same as the one Peters has been doing in Sheffield for fifteen years. Notice the pattern. Name it. Build a small, repeatable response to it. Come back next week and see what held.

Holding the thread

The part of the work that is hardest to see, and the part that practitioners talk about least in public, is the record. A player will say something in week three that only makes sense in week eleven. A pattern that looks like nerves in February turns out, by May, to have been there since the player was fifteen. Without a quiet, accurate record of what was said and when, that thread evaporates. The next session begins from a slightly worse starting place, and over a year the drift compounds.

Peters is still part of O'Sullivan's working circle. In a 2024 interview he confirmed they were working together again ahead of that year's World Championship. The relationship is now in its second decade. There is no headline at the end of it, no clean act break, because this kind of work does not have one. It is a long, patient correspondence between two people about a single subject, which is what to do with a mind that has spent its whole adult life being good at one extremely hard thing. The work is never finished. That, in the end, is the point.